By Don Thayù
We who live today have inherited a war. It is a war in which our ancestors lost. It is a war that very few people even know is being fought. It is the war for our freedom. It is the war for human independence.
This war was won by the pirates among our ancestors, long ago, but there’s always hope. As Etienne De La Botie said so beautifully in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, over 500 years ago, “There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off…Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it.”
As parents, most of us are familiar with the eternal complaint from their children, “Why?”
“Why do I have to do chores?”
“Why do I have to read?”
“Why do I have to study?”
“Why do I have to learn these construction techniques?”
“Why do I have to help on the farm?”
The answer is a simple one, but one that most parents never know or want to share, because they have become victims of this war. I will articulate it here, before proceeding.
The answer to these whys, the answer lost to our minds today, yet clear in the minds of all the warriors of our past, and in the minds of those few who still fight today for freedom and liberty, is this: You must do these things, my child, because we are at war, and if you want to make it through this war and remain human, you have to live the life of a warrior.
For the “Whys” that will inevitably follow such an answer, here is some of the rest of the “adult education” a warrior-parent could share with their child:
“We live in a world where our entire society is designed to tell you that you are a slave; that your property is only yours by permission, not by right. You’ll be told to strive for adulthood, and then discover that it is a scam, that true adulthood is too dangerous to be permitted. The only adulthood you’ll experience is a watered down version that will be licensed to you by your masters, and can be easily taken away. Your slavery will be sold to you under the flag of freedom and liberty, but, nonetheless, you were born into slavery and you’ll remain a slave. You’ll be given one of two choices, to either be a slave, or to be a master. I want to be free, and I refuse to be either one. I am determined to give you that same third choice. I want you to be free, and that means I have a duty, as your parent, to help you become a warrior. You also must do these things because freedom and liberty are not prizes to be won, but are merely the successful escape from different types of prison. Should you win your freedom and liberty, the real work begins, and your skills as a warrior will then be put to their proper use, in the continual fight against entropy. You’ll fight for creativity, productivity, efficiency, knowledge, understanding, empathy, wisdom, and joy. These things aren’t free gifts from the universe. If we want to live as humans, we have to fight. We have to fight other people, in order to avoid the pirates among us, and we have to fight against nature in order to build the life we love, and to make the world a better place for me and for you. That’s why you must read, work, learn, practice, fail, iterate, and succeed. I want you to be a healthy human being. The alternative is the norm we see all around us–confused slaves, looking for better and better victim stories, hoping the universe will somehow help them endure life until the blessed release of the grave grants them their reward in heaven. I want to live, and I want to teach you to love your life. That means, we’re warriors, not slaves or masters.”
The answer could go on for quite a while, and understanding will probably take a long time, but if we want our children to be human, it’s the only way.
Parents today don’t share these things with their children because the pirates among our ancient ancestors achieved a major victory. Out of a need to survive as pirates, they became humanity’s intellectuals. The institutions we all use and depend upon every day were either designed, or heavily influenced, by them.
Today’s parents are the children of the children of many generations of victims. They are conquered warriors who have lost their true identity. The identity of a warrior had become very dangerous, so they replaced it with something that felt safer. The world over, they have accepted the identity of a slave, or of an eternal child.
Instead of arming our children with the very simple knowledge of the fact that they are participants in an ongoing struggle, we instead add to their burden by perpetuating the moral fog in which we all live.
Slavery never went away. It is too profitable. It simply and smoothly transformed into something much less obvious, and far more profitable–the incremental slavery of democracy.
This war has produced an endless stream of victims and consequences. One such consequence I’ll describe here as “Mùthoni’s Dilemma”.
Mùthoni’s Dilemma
Mùthoni is a very smart and beautiful young woman, age 13, who found herself caught up in a game and a project that was instigated by her father, and his friend.
Mùthoni’s father is a very radical Chef, with ideas he hopes to spread to as many people as he can. His ideas are controversial, and he holds them very passionately. This passion has spilled over into his parenting. Thus, Mùthoni has the burden, and privilege, of being raised by a slightly fanatic, yet loving, father.
The game I'm referring to is a health game. Mùthoni’s father has, through long experimentation and thought, developed his own gourmet cuisine, as well as a weight loss program, designed to help people reach their ideal body weight. Mùthoni and her brother, age 11, were often on the receiving end of these food experiments, and as a result, they have eaten nothing but the best quality foods their father could find. She will have to be the judge as to the flavor and personal appeal of her father’s cuisine, but without exception, the nutritional quality of the food she has grown up eating has been top tier.
Mùthoni is attending public school in the United States. She has friends and acquaintances from her school, and from time to time, the subject of health, and specifically, weight, is brought into their daily conversation. One major aspect of U.S. schools, an aspect deliberately designed as a key part of the structure by John Dewey himself (inventor of the Dewey Decimal System), is the system of peer pressure. Much like the pecking order in a chicken coop, school kids naturally sort themselves into tribes. This peer pressure nearly always surpasses the power of its institutional predecessor–family pressure.
An emergent property of US government education is the fact that nothing is more central to young women of Mùthoni’s age than self image. Body weight is a very significant factor in these calculations.
When her Chef father and his friend, over speaker phone, began discussing their different weights, both their current and recent measurements, Mùthoni was caught up in the dialogue. Soon the scale was brought out, and everyone was weighing themselves. Her father’s friend had been 254 lbs a little over 3 weeks ago, and had lost a good 25 pounds with a combination of fasting and breaking his fasts with her father’s cuisine. He now stood just under 230 lbs. Her father weighed in at just over 150 lbs. Mùthoni and her brother got in the game, reporting 109 lbs and 70 lbs, respectively.
Now Mùthoni was caught. Her self-image had her standing somewhere around 100 lbs. This was sort of like a grade, regarded by herself, and by her school friends, as a significant part of their self images, and of their view of each other. Mùthoni was caught by surprise, seeing the scale sit at 109, and her immediate response was, “I need to lose some weight!”
I’m writing this article to connect a few things that may benefit from a close examination. What is going on in Mùthoni’s mind? What do we know? What is her environment? What can we deduce?
The pecking order of government education, perhaps all over the world, but specifically in the good old USA, is a fierce thing to experience. The peer pressure of government schools is a culture in and of itself. It overwrites much of the other cultural influences a child or young adult may experience. Family culture, national culture, religious culture, and many other influences crash like waves upon the rock of peer pressure.
Mùthoni’s response to the scale had strong implications to her. She saw it in light of the friends she associates with at school. The opinion of her parents and her brother pale to insignificance when compared to the impact the opinions her school friends will have. Should that number get out, what would they think? Out of self defense, she knew she must lose a few pounds to regain her ideal, the ideal constructed by her self-image.
But Mùthoni was missing a key factor. Her father had identified a major problem in human society. As a side effect, she had become immune to the physical effects of this problem. She was not, however, immune to the psychological effects, as the scale proved.
Mùthoni’s Chef father had discovered a problem so vast that it actually qualifies as one of humanity’s grand challenges. He named it the “food system”.
Mùthoni’s father grew up in Kenya, and had experienced village life, eating the indigenous food, and speaking the Kikuyu language of the culture there. Never using refrigeration or the canning process, his food experience was based on a living food supply chain. Traveling to the US as a young college student, he experienced the food system of Western Civilization. He tasted the refrigerated milk, the canned and frozen foods, and the fast foods that were the product of our present day centralized global food supply chain. He was not impressed. Not only did the food disagree with him, but over the course of a few short months, he began to feel the ill effects on his body. Shortly thereafter, he searched out and found the local food growers, and began eating as close as he could manage to the indigenous diet which had served him so well in his childhood.
His experience was so profound that it shaped his college education and his purpose. He has worked for the past three decades to learn the depths to which the global food supply chain’s nutritional value has dropped. He learned that the quality had dropped to such a level that not only was the nutritional value pathetic when compared to the organic indigenous food he grew up with, but it was, in many cases, actually toxic. He linked this poor and dangerous state of the global food system to the global health crisis being experienced in every nation that has adopted it. Because of these findings, he was determined to find the highest quality and the least contaminated food available here in the US.
This is exclusively what he has been eating for the last 30 years, and that is the food that Mùthoni and her brother have eaten, as well. Her father has done his best to prevent her and her brother from even tasting what he now calls “fiat food”, determined to keep their pallets and microbiomes hungering for the virtuous, and distaining the viscous.
This epic “food fight”, instigated by her father, and taken up passively and actively by nearly everyone Mùthoni has met, is a constant battle. Mùthoni, unlike her father, is a stranger in a strange land, not because of any cultural misalignment, but simply because food is such a powerful connective tissue of society. Her food is so different from that of her friends, their families, and nearly everyone she knows. This incompatibility contributes to the dilemma she faces every day–to get along with Dad, or to fit in. Both choices have dire consequences. In some ways, especially as a young woman making her way through the chaos of the US government “education” system, it must seem like a no-win scenario.
But what Mùthoni has yet to discover is the depth of her good fortune. For all of her friends at school, weight is going to be a constant battle. Mental health, physical health, and body weight are severely impacted by the quality of one’s food. The fear that almost oozes from the pores of her friends is well-founded, and our US culture is flooded with that fear. Should I eat that donut? Should I take one more helping of spaghetti, or one more slice of garlic bread? How much am I going to have to pay for the choices my appetite forces upon me?
For those of us stuck in, and addicted to the fiat food system, food is always a win-lose scenario. What makes our taste buds happy destroys us, and our medical system is severely overloaded with the consequences.
Compounding the problem is the fact that our medical system has evolved not only to cope with an ever-increasing load, but to defend the fiat food system that is its cause. We never hear doctors talking seriously about a patient’s weight. We don’t see scales at Walmart, but heart and blood pressure monitors. There is no profit in people responsibly managing their weight, but there are billions to be made in managing the symptoms of the overweight.
Here in the United States, we believe to our core that obesity is a natural part of getting older, and our medicine is designed to manage our ever expanding weight. It is forced to cooperate with, or to go to war with our food system, and the global food system, as Mùthoni’s father learned, is far too profitable and well-established to make such a fight seem wise.
Besides, there never was a better win-win scenario than a financial alliance between the food system and the medical system. One sets up the body to fail, and the other specializes in profiting from the sick care of failing bodies.
As a young adult, Mùthoni is not only profiting from the excellent health of youth, but from the excellent quality of her food. The fears that plague her peers and that she sees in the media all around her are not applicable to her. Her weight is not only healthy, but the threat of fatty liver disease, obesity, and heart disease we see in more and more young people is something she will completely dodge, if she continues in her diet as she has begun.
Her father has learned that fiat food spreads so much of the physical disease and disorder we see, and that this sickness has a strong and pervasive mental aspect to it, which spreads just as easily. Mùthoni, because of her diet, is immune to the physical diseases caused by fiat food, since she does not partake of it. But the psychology of fiat culture is much more difficult to dodge.
In writing this, I’ve had to assume much about Mùthoni’s life and thought process. I beg her forgiveness. I could be completely wrong. Of course, I am the friend of her father I mentioned above, and I’ve just begun what is turning into a lifelong journey of abstaining from fiat food. I’m learning to support my health with gourmet food from her father’s cuisine. I can only imagine what it must be like for her and her brother, being raised by a Chef who is so driven by his vision. But that vision is contagious. It only takes a brief look to see the truth about our food system. Her father is trying his best to be a warrior parent, and to raise warriors instead of slaves or masters.
Mùthoni’s dilemma, as I see it, is that she must choose whether or not to continue to eat the food of her childhood. Should she value it, along with the flavors and the health benefits, she will continue to be an outsider. Food is so integral to human interactions that it will take a strong character to make such a fundamental social choice. On the other hand, she could choose to lessen the mental pressure, and to avoid all the arguments, explanations, and inconveniences imposed by nearly unique dietary requirements. She could become all-American, and enjoy the party that fiat food offers.
I was so fascinated to hear her response to the scale. I have adult female friends who now weigh more than I do, and who aspire to reach an ideal body weight of 150 lbs or so. The funny thing, from my perspective, about Mùthoni’s situation, is that she has absolutely nothing to worry about physically. The problem I see she must face is all psychological, and I hope she has the strength of mind and character to see what a unique opportunity she has with a chef as a father, and not just any chef, but THE Chef, Master Kabui. I know of no one else who is doing the work he is doing, and I think his cuisine and philosophy is going to take the world by storm.
Mùthoni’s school friends, as long as they stay plugged into the fiat food system, will always be battling with the monster consequences of fiat food. But that monster will never set eyes upon her if she continues as she’s begun.
It’s such a unique problem that I wanted to write about it. It must be something like growing up in a liquor store, surrounded by drinkers and alcoholics, but refusing ever to drink. She must see the delicious flavor combinations and the very powerful advertisements, and continue to live as if they didn’t matter. That would require a strong character indeed. Or maybe it’s like a religious convert living among heathens, or an atheist surrounded by religious fanatics. What a thing to ask of your child. What a thing for Mùthoni to ask of herself.
But what is your health worth? To a young person, health is quite often a free gift. As a man in my early 50’s, my gift of health is well-worn and falling apart. If I could buy a new one, I would. But maybe, just maybe, in a way, I can. If, as Chef Kabui says, our food system in Western Culture is not designed so much for our health as it is for mass production, appeal, and ever-increasing sales, then the best way to recapture the lost health of my youth may be through my food choices, and a deliberate decision to return to my ideal body weight.
I’ve been a fan of life extension technologies since I first learned about the subject. Stem cell research, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, miracle pills to manage the telomeres of our chromosomes–it all sounds fascinating. It makes me wonder if I’ll live long enough to see medical research solve aging itself, and allow me to live a healthy life for several hundred more years. But realistically, I probably won’t.
However, since meeting Chef Kabui, I’ve realized that he may well be right in his belief that our global medical crisis is almost exclusively a function of our failing food system. If he’s right, then the best shot I have at life extension is to lose another 60 lbs, and to eat as uncontaminated, and as nutritionally sound food as I can find.
We are at war for our freedom. Chef talks about food justice, food literacy, and the terrible power of the fiat food system. This is just one aspect of the fight for our freedom and liberty. Chef believes that at present one of the best moves for any warrior is to fight for the quality of our food. It isn’t toppling any government, or changing any presidencies, but it just might change our world for the better, and free us from the horrible trap of fiat food.
I wish Mùthoni and her brother the best in their fight. They have a unique position to either defend or abandon, depending on what their strength allows. I’m rocked every day as an addict to fiat food, trying to recover my health and learn a new way to eat. They are looking at this battle from the other side, having the experience of many years of good eating, and now having to exercise the willpower of maintaining such a solid stance in the face of a world of food junkies. I honestly don’t know which is the tougher fight, but I'm happy to do my part.